8 things you should know about Trump and the Environment

1. Joe Pizarchik spent more than seven years working on a (recently passed) regulation to protect streams from mountaintop removal coal mining. It took Congress 25 hours to kill it. This is just one of dozens of regulations that Republicans have begun erasing. (Politico, 02/12/2017)
2. The Trump administration is requiring that political appointees review all Environmental Protection Agency studies and data prior to public release, according to a report from the Associated Press. The controversial new rules, which will also apply to information displayed on the EPA’s website, have sparked outrage from scientists and journalists.
3. Trump has said he will cancel Obama’s moratorium on selling coal from federal lands and Obama’s order that federal agencies take climate change into account in environmental reviews.
4. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) director nominee believes the issue of whether climate change is happening is “far from settled.” In fact, he is the man who led the fossil fuel industry’s lawsuit against the EPA’s clean power plan.
5. Trump himself said last year that “climate change” was a hoax created by the Chinese to hurt the U. S. economy (although he has since shifted to “undecided”).
6. Trump’s nominee to head the Dept. of the Interior “supports the Keystone pipeline and supported measures to remove protections of endangered species, while opposing legislation to regulate fracking.”
7. US representative Jason Chaffetz has legislation to direct the Interior secretary to immediately sell off an area of public land the size of Connecticut, arguing that public ownership serves “no purpose for taxpayers.”
8. Trump’s nominee to run the Dept of Energy is none other than Rick Perry, the man who promised to eliminate the Dept of Energy during his own presidential campaign.